A throng of dense housing enthusiasts descended upon Curtis Park in the Five Points neighborhood on Wednesday, hoping to learn lessons that could be replicated citywide.
The area, one of the oldest in the city’s history, has garnered a reputation for being a mixed-income community while also balancing neighborhood aesthetics.
“There’s things to own and things to rent,” said Joel Noble, a Curtis Park resident of over 30 years. “There are big houses, there are small houses, there’s small apartments, subdivided houses. Any situation for your price point has always been here and still retains an awful lot of that.”
Noble is part of the advisory committee of the “Unlocking Housing Choices” project, a city-led project that could change the Denver Zoning Code and other regulations to allow more “middle housing” — basically residential properties that sit between single-family homes and giant apartment complexes.
If passed, Unlocking Housing Choices could bring the density of Curtis Park to neighborhoods across the city in the decades of construction to come.
Advocates want to address “missing middle housing.”
It’s no secret that housing and home affordability has been a problem that city officials have been trying to solve for decades. After a pandemic-era housing market boom, things have once again slowed, with buyers and sellers tussling over who has the upper hand.
Lukas Hagen, the research and policy manager at affordable home building coalition Neighborhood Development Collaborative, said they have a solution — a return to building low-density multifamily housing, like duplexes, quadplexes and more.
City data found that only 10% of Denver’s housing stock has two to nine units on a single lot. Meanwhile, 42% are detached single-unit homes.
“This housing form — duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes — have become more economical to build and become more affordable for more people as a result of single unit home construction becoming more expensive,” Hagen said. “People wanting to move out of larger apartments as their households grow and as they look to have a little bit more green space or a little bit more space in their life.”
What would the project actually do?
On paper, it would be a text amendment to Denver’s zoning code, which would also have to be approved by Denver City Council.
While the precise details of the proposal won’t be clear until it’s presented in full, the city’s Community Planning and Development department said the amendment would add restrictions to the size and scale of new homes; and allow additional housing to be built on lots with existing homes.
Part of the problem city planners want to solve is the demolition of smaller, affordable houses to make way for larger, more expensive homes. The city found that of all the demolitions over the last 15 years, about two-thirds of them were replaced with larger single-family homes.
The change wouldn’t transform neighborhoods overnight. Instead, Hagen said this will give neighborhoods more flexibility in terms of how to adapt to future growth.
“It’s hard to project terribly far into the future how much this will yield, but what we do know is it’ll give the neighborhoods the opportunity to adapt to the economy and to adapt to housing needs,” he said.
In a city-led community survey for the project, response to the proposals were split, but leaned mostly positive.
“Overall, feedback indicates general openness to the project’s goals, but highlights the need to address feasibility, ensure meaningful affordability, tailor solutions to different neighborhoods, and provide clear implementation strategies,” the city wrote on the project website.
Advisory committee members and city officials toured middle housing in two neighborhoods.
About a dozen people, including two Denver City Council members, neighborhood organizers and more, joined the Unlocking Housing Choices team on Wednesday afternoon as it visited middle housing units in Elyria- Swansea and Curtis Park.
The group saw several properties, like 16 duplexes built in the heart of Elyria-Swansea in 2021, just a few blocks away from the Purina factory. Those properties, named Swansea Homes, sold to families making under 80 percent of the area median income at the time. Each one has three or four bedrooms, making them suitable for nuclear families.
In Curtis Park, the group was led on a tour by local historian John Hayden, who showed them historic single-family homes, which have since been split up into multifamily units while maintaining their aesthetic appeal.
But Hayden also pointed out several homes that once housed several units that have since been converted back into single-family homes.
“When this neighborhood had a huge immigrant population and needed smaller units, many of these homes were turned into multi-unit properties,” Hayden said. “And then in the 1980s — more in the 1990s to the early 2000s — people began buying them and converting them back to single family homes. And so now there’s a mixture of some that are single family and some that are still multi-unit.”
Philip Taylor, a resident of the Regis neighborhood, came on the tour to learn more about Unlocking Housing Choices and what kind of density could be incentivized.
“I’m hopeful that this initiative can strike a balance,” Taylor said. “We want to build affordable homes, but we want to have a bare minimum amount of aesthetics and community features, community facing features like front porches, like what we see right here.”
Denver City Council would have to approve any recommended changes to the zoning code. On Wednesday’s tour, District 9 Councilmember Darrell Watson said he’s supportive of the changes and that there hasn’t been an “abundance” of concern or negative responses from his district.
“I’m a strong supporter and I will be encouraging, based on the facts and the opportunity this provides for families to stay in our neighborhoods that want to stay, my colleagues to support me,” he said.